When making the selection of key performance indicators or KPIs in a company, a thorough analysis of the objectives pursued as an organization, their context, and how each process will contribute to achieving them must be done.
Standards such as ISO 9001 require you to generate data and define indicators for all processes, in this case you must pay special attention to those that affect the level of customer satisfaction by introducing quality indicators, such as “Delivery Time”, “Complaints Received”, “Qualification in Satisfaction Survey”, etc.
When the key performance indicators don’t reach the goal, they usually have repercussions beyond the responsible process itself and you have to solve these breaches as soon as possible, I give you 5 reasons that could be occurring in your company why you are not complying with your key performance indicators or KPIs.
Table of Contents
1- The goal of the KPIs is unattainable
This point is the first that you must analyze, many times top management defines goals that are too ambitious thinking that it will generate motivation in those responsibles, but the opposite ends up happening.
While the goals that are defined for the key performance indicators should provide a challenge that leads to continuous improvement of the process at each evaluation period, it is also important to maintain an attainable figure within its capabilities.
2- The root cause of non-compliance of the KPIs is not properly defined
When you are analyzing why they are not reaching the desired goals, always make sure to do an adequate root cause analysis just as you would when you make a report of corrective actions or non-compliance audit within the ISO 9001 quality management systems.
Use tools such as the 5 whys, Ishikawa diagram, etc. Even the simple act of brainstorming with those involved will give you a much broader picture of why the goal is not being reached.
3- Those responsible for the processes involved don’t participate in the resolution of the problem.
As I just mentioned in the previous point, you must handle the resolution of the non-fulfillment of the objective as a corrective actions.
Commonly, full responsibility for the resolution of the problem is assigned to the leader of the process that has failed but remember that the ideal is to work within a process-based approach, as required by ISO 9001.
With this in mind you will realize that all processes are connected, some more closely than others, and what happens in a process affects the others, so when a breach occurs all those involved must participate both in determining the root cause as well as in the problem solving.
This involvement of various processes is even more apparent when it comes to the company’s quality indicators.
4- Lack of training and communication of results to staff
It is likely that staff are not sufficiently aware of the importance of obtaining data in their processes or of how key performance indicators or KPIs and quality indicators affect both the level of well-being of the company and that of the customer.
If they don’t have a clear perception of why the measurement of the performance of the processes is being carried out and the control implemented in them, it will be difficult for them to commit to obtaining data and solving problems when objectives and goals are not reached.
In this case, the only option is to provide training to the staff until there is real awareness, in turn, the result of the reviews should always be communicated to all the staff involved in the process, thus increasing their level of participation and commitment.
5- The review period is not adequate
When you define the key performance indicators, you must establish the period in which the data will be analyzed to know if they are reaching the indicated goals.
This review period must be adequate, since if it’s very short you will not give the process the opportunity to reflect the results when you implement corrective actions and if you define it too long you will lose control over it when you perform the analysis.
Evaluate with the person in charge, the capacity and objectives of the process to be able to define an adequate analysis period that can reflect results when improvement actions are implemented.
One more reason… There is no participation of top management
The support and participation of top management is essential for any management system to function properly, not in vain the ISO 9001 standard has a specific requirement in this regard in order to ensure an adequate level of quality and customer satisfaction.
Without the involvement of top management, it will be difficult to properly monitor the evaluation of processes and the strategy to follow when a process doesn’t reach its goals.
For this reason, it’s important that you include those responsible for top management in all dynamics, since the initial training to define the indicators and each results review, thus you will obtain a greater commitment to them in the improvement strategy.
The use of software for the management of key performance indicators or KPIs will greatly facilitate this point since it will make it more convenient for top management to monitor and implement corrective actions in case of non-compliance.
